I've been
thinking a lot over the last few days about the content potential of TrackBack. In a nutshell, TrackBack is an automatic way for your website to notify other sites whenever you publish a link to them -- so that they know you're talking about them. (
Here's an explanation.) This makes it easier to follow discussion of a topic across many websites. TrackBack is a built-in feature of many popular blogging tools, and thus is most commonly used in blogs. I don't think I've ever seen a traditional news organization's site that uses TrackBack -- but they can, and Movable Type has made that easy by offering a
standalone TrackBack tool. I think news organizations might want to consider this option. Here's why:
On the web, no site is an island. Everything is interconnected. Those interconnections give a whole new level of meaning and context to that information -- and this is useful not just to consumers of information, but to producers. If news organizations provided TrackBack pings, they'd have the marketing and publicity benefit of automatically notifying every site they link to from a news story. (I realize that providing external links from news stories remains a touchy issue at many news organizations, but come on guys, get with it!) If they accepted and published TrackBack pings for each story, they'd offer readers the added benefit of access to the wide range of conversation sparked online by that article. This might allow blogs and news sites to work cooperatively and leverage each other, to great mutual benefit. Also, TrackBack data would be good for marketers to ponder -- maybe even more useful than data on who's reading which stories on the news site. Would there be issues of quality control? Of course. But I think the potential value of providing this level of context is a good reason to face those challenges.
